Vietnam's Global Alignment Balance: Keeping Partnership Calibration in Perspective
Vietnam's Global Alignment Balance: Keeping Partnership Calibration in Perspective
Recent developments involving the United States, Australia, Israel and Russia spotlight the broader question of how Vietnam calibrates its broader array of relationships.
Dear Readers - below is the first iteration of an occasional series called ASEAN Wonk QuickViews, where we’ll share periodic insights on current trends and developments that matter, readable in less than five minutes.
Vietnam's Global Alignment Balance: Keeping Partnership Calibration in Perspective
Recent headlines on Vietnam’s alignments over the past few weeks, including potential upgrades in ties with Australia and the United States, progress on a Vietnam-Israel free trade agreement, and a first Russia-Vietnam intergovernmental meeting since the start of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, spotlight a broader issue: how we comprehend the broader context of the balance of risks and opportunities Hanoi faces in calibrating and diversifying its fuller array of ties amid a challenging regional and global environment.
Vietnam is often characterized as having a series of categories as part of a broader calibration of multidirectional foreign policy that are not without significance in terms of signaling advancement or prioritization. While Vietnam is not the only country that employs these and they can be flexibly adjusted as I’ve noted before, the typology of partnerships include comprehensive partnerships, strategic partnerships and comprehensive strategic partnerships, with the highest level historically restricted to China and Russia but gradually evolving to include ties with other countries as well (see table below on select recent developments).
Continuity and change within this typology can be framed as a balance between opportunities and risks amid various considerations, be it strengthening alignments that can produce diplomatic or economic gains, preserving regime security for the Vietnamese Communist Party or navigating developments that can complicate the pursuit of a multidirectional foreign policy such as rising U.S.-China competition or a more challenging environment for free trade. Seen from this perspective, there are several considerations in this respect, even bearing in mind the key caveat that this typology in and of itself naturally cannot tell us much about the evolution of Vietnam’s balancing of its ties with immediate neighbors, traditional relationships and more contemporary partners – with inflection points such as a millenia of resistance to Chinese domination; nationalism and perceived deferred unification and security that involved wars with three of the five current permanent members of the UN Security Council; and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 that at that time dominated Southeast Asia’s security landscape.
The first consideration is the broader series of trends in continuity and change within the hierarchy of partnerships. For instance, while an upgrade with the United States is at times seen as a metric for Vietnam’s alignment diversification, looking beyond Hanoi’s ties with Washington, one of the biggest developments in recent years has arguably been South Korea’s elevation to the highest tier of a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2022, the first entry into this tier since India back in 2016. Seen from a wider perspective, this represents the gradual addition of more countries to among the higher tiers of Vietnam’s partnerships beyond China and Russia, which is occurring amid speculation about a future Australia CSP.
The second is the substance of the individual relationship itself, relative to the optics of an elevation. For example, while the elevation in ties with the United States has been a subject of conversation for years - indeed, nomenclature was at issue even back to when the naming of the comprehensive partnership was being discussed a decade ago) - that should not detract from the fact that by any measure, both sides have substantively boosted relations significantly across domains, in areas ranging from civil space to health to energy (see table below for select examples of these developments). At the same time, precisely because of the sensitivities associated with the United States, which include the effects of ties on Beijing as seen by the Vietnamese government (it’s worth noting that the Vietnamese population has registered among the highest levels of pro-U.S. sentiment among Southeast Asian countries in some past polls like this one), the timing of the upgrade would naturally be more carefully considered amid shifts within the overall relationship over time.
